Good Luck with your work – Translation into Korean
Korean called Hangugeo 한국어/韓國語, in South Korea and Chosŏnmal, 조선말/朝鮮말 in North Korea, is an East Asian language spoken by about 77 million people. It is both their official and national languages, with different standardized official forms used in each country. It is a recognised minority language in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin Province, China. It is also spoken in parts of Sakhalin, Russia and Central Asia.
Modern Korean is understood to have descended from the Middle Korean, which emerged from the Old Korean, which itself, culminated from the Proto-Koreanic language, that is suggested to have its linguistic homeland somewhere in Manchuria. Studies suggest that the Proto-Koreans, who were present in northern Korea, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula at around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had an influence on each other and later a founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families. Chinese characters arrived in Korea with Buddhism during the Proto-Three Kingdoms era (1st century BC) and were adapted for Korean that came to be known as Hanja, and remained as the main script for writing Korean for over a millennium alongside various phonetic scripts that were later invented such as Idu, Gugyeol and Hyangchal. The majority of the population remained illiterate, as Hanja remained reserved for reading and writing by the privileged elites – the nobles!
Thus Hanja came to be the original text ever studied and learnt in Korea, but restricted to study by nobles only. As a result, most people remained illiterate. To increase literacy amongst his subjects, King Sejong the Great, of the 15th century, personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system, (Hun Min Joeong Um meaning correct sounds to educate the people- known today as Hangul) consisting of 28 basic characters, as he strongly believed that restricted use of Hanja, had resulted due to inadequacy to write Korean. Today, Hangul has only 24 are in use with 14 consonants and 10 vowels.
Introduced first in the document Hunminjeongeum, Hangul was called as eonmun (colloquial script) and it spread like fire nationwide to increase literacy in Korea. While Hangul was widely used by all the Korean classes, it was often treated as amkeul (script for women), and disregarded by privileged elites, who upheld Hanja as jinseo (true text). And it wasn’t until the 17th century, the elite class of Yangban started exchanging Hangul letters with their slaves, suggesting a high literacy rate of Hangul during the Joseon era.
Today, Hanja remains important for historical and linguistic studies only and is largely unused in everyday life due to inconvenience. Hanja is not officially used in North Korea anymore, and their usage in South Korea is reduced to specific publications, such as newspapers, scholarly papers, and disambiguation.
